give this man his wings
Character: Basque Grand
Summary: He, too, is caged.
Among the state alchemists Iron Blood went along with the best was Lightening because most sane people got along with her. She was someone he could easily understand because her opinions were not as radical and fanatic as those of many other people and she lacked the childlike optimism so many of her peers still had.
Some might even say that Colonel Grand and Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton – not Major General Hamilton because that woman had been a vile one – had been cut from the same cloth. They acknowledged their situation and realised that they were not as free as they wanted to be. They realised that they were not free, that they were bound by invisible ties. Iron Blood once even said that they had been conditioned to believe that their choices had been theirs while in truth, they had never had a choice because the very moment they had entered the military, they had been trapped because a state alchemist either was discharged because of a mental breakdown, because he was dead or because he had turned out to be a loose cannon.
After Ishbal, the Iron Blood Alchemist was not among those who were ordered to attend frequently psychological counsel meetings because according to High Command, he was not likely to commit suicide. He was only confused and also shocked when he heard that Lightening had been ordered to attend because she had seemed to be pretty sane and healthy even after all the bloodshed they had seen. He asked her about this when they met on a meeting, right after his promotion to brigadier general and hers to colonel, and she only smiled thinly before she told him that she had to remember the meaning of "I" and the value of her own free will.
This was when he realised that the consequences of the war ran deeper than he had previously assumed. He, too, did no mo longer remember what he was meant to do because everything he had done had ended in a catastrophe and he wanted to do something, anything right.
She looked at him with a gaze that was not pitying because he knew that she knew that he would have hated her for pitying him. "My doc told me to love who I am and to free myself of the guilt," she said, patting his shoulder. "Do the same, Iron, free yourself and free your soul."
And so he stood there, looking after her as she hurried down the hallway to disappear once more, leaving nothing but the scent of wildflowers and freedom and a strangely tensed atmosphere in her wake.